Presently she ventured, “It’s impossible?”

“Impossible?”

She seemed to use her words cautiously, like weapons that might slip and inflict a cut.  “What she suggests.”

Her son, raising himself, turned to look at her for the first time.  Their glance met in a shock of comprehension.  He was with her against the girl, then!  Her satisfaction overflowed in a murmur of tenderness.

“Of course not, dear.  One can’t change—­change one’s life....”

“One’s self,” he emended.  “That’s what I tell her.  What’s the use of my giving up the paper if I keep my point of view?”

The psychological distinction attracted her.  “Which is it she minds most?”

“Oh, the paper—­for the present.  She undertakes to modify the point of view afterward.  All she asks is that I shall renounce my heresy:  the gift of grace will come later.”

Mrs. Quentin sat gazing into her untouched cup.  Her son’s first words had produced in her the hallucinated sense of struggling in the thick of a crowd that he could not see.  It was horrible to feel herself hemmed in by influences imperceptible to him; yet if anything could have increased her misery it would have been the discovery that her ghosts had become visible.

As though to divert his attention, she precipitately asked, “And you—?”

His answer carried the shock of an evocation.  “I merely asked her what she thought of you.”

“Of me?”

“She admires you immensely, you know.”

For a moment Mrs. Quentin’s cheek showed the lingering light of girlhood:  praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the transmitter’s merit.  “Well—?” she smiled.

“Well—­you didn’t make my father give up the Radiator, did you?”

His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return:  “She never comes here.  How can she know me?”

“She’s so poor!  She goes out so little.”  He rose and leaned against the mantel-piece, dislodging with impatient fingers a slender bronze wrestler poised on a porphyry base, between two warm-toned Spanish ivories.  “And then her mother—­” he added, as if involuntarily.

“Her mother has never visited me,” Mrs. Quentin finished for him.

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Mrs. Fenno has the scope of a wax doll.  Her rule of conduct is taken from her grandmother’s sampler.”

“But the daughter is so modern—­and yet—­”

“The result is the same?  Not exactly. She admires you—­oh, immensely!” He replaced the bronze and turned to his mother with a smile.  “Aren’t you on some hospital committee together?  What especially strikes her is your way of doing good.  She says philanthropy is not a line of conduct, but a state of mind—­and it appears that you are one of the elect.”

As, in the vague diffusion of physical pain, relief seems to come with the acuter pang of a single nerve, Mrs. Quentin felt herself suddenly eased by a rush of anger against the girl.  “If she loved you—­” she began.